Wednesday, April 13, 2011

I'd Make Glen A. Larson My Bitch

With the current Hollywood trend to resurrect familiar television properties from the early 80's, I think I've hit upon a winning idea. Glenn A. Larson was responsible for a number of great TV shows back in the 80's, and some of his work (Battlestar Galactica and V) has already been mined successfully by Hollywood execs. All but ignored, however, are two other successful Larson shows: B.J and the Bear and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. B.J. and the Bear was the story of freelance trucker B.J. McKay, who traveled the country's highways in a red and white semi truck with his pet chimpanzee, Bear. Along the way, they got into hilarious misadventures involving zany sheriffs and beautiful women. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century told the story of Captain William "Buck" Rogers who was frozen in 1987 and awoken in 2491 to find that Earth needs his help to survive.

They're great concepts, right? The sad thing is, we probably won't see an adaptation of the Buck Rogers that Glen A. Larson envisioned because the character of Buck Rogers has had a number of different incarnations over the last 80 years and the rights to that character are tied up by a lot of different issues. That's not a problem, however, because we don't need Buck Rogers himself, we just need some charismatic male from the 1980's to transport to the 25th Century in order to have the proper fish-out-of-water story. With this in mind, I give you B.J. and the Bear in the 25th Century:

The year is 1987, and Kenworth manufacturers the last of its cab-over-semi trucks. Aboard this K-100, Billy Joe "B.J." McKay was to travel America, delivering parcels with his chimp sidekick, Bear. In a freak mishap, his climate control functions were frozen by temperatures beyond imagination. B.J and the Bear were blown out of their planned itinerary into an orbit millions of times more vast. An orbit which was to return B.J. and the Bear to Earth.....500 YEARS LATER!